My stubborn trust in manual door gap checks just got busted
I used to swear by my feeler gauge and a good eye for setting elevator door gaps, thinking anything else was overkill. Last month, I was troubleshooting a persistent noise complaint in a mid-rise apartment building. We'd adjusted the doors three times by hand, but the grinding sound kept coming back. A younger mechanic on site insisted we try his digital gap meter. I laughed it off at first, calling it unnecessary. He showed me the readout: one side was a full millimeter tighter than the other, something we totally missed. After fixing it to the exact spec, the noise vanished and hasn't returned. I had to eat my words and order one of those meters the next day. It turns out my old methods weren't as perfect as I thought.